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Yet more Sunday shopping will ruin community life

This is another sign of our increasingly materialistic society

Tim Montgomerie

July 8 2015, 1:01am, The Times

We know what the economy might gain from extended Sunday shopping hours — £200 million in London alone, according to Treasury boffins. But what will society lose? How many people will be yanked away from the Sunday dinner table to work a full day at a faraway shopping store? The individual choice for some to buy goods they don’t need with money they don’t have requires that another person’s Sunday visit to Gran or to church must end — or their employability might suffer.

We can’t even answer my question about the social cost of market forces because we’ve become an increasingly materialistic society that knows the economic value of everything but barely tries to measure the strength — or weakness — of community life. We measure…